Carolyn and Dmitry discuss Piero San Giorgio's book
Women On The Verge Of Societal Breakdown published by
Club Orlov Press. Dmitry states that the book illustrates the crucial role which women need to play, as traditional keepers of home and hearth, to keep the family together and doing well during treacherous, turbulent times. But the book also recognizes the great difficulties women will face as the societies they depend on decay and fall apart, and the precariousness of the major gains women have made over the past century, which Piero rightly calls the Century of Women. While recent social progress has made women independent and men somewhat superfluous, these trends tend to quickly reverse as society begins to regress. Piero calls on men to start acting like men once again, and to once again become strong, reliable defenders of women and of their families.
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| Piero San Giorgio |
19 comments:
Piero is out to lunch when he says that men should start acting like in the past. Women do not want to be protected now, nor they will until there is blood in the street. Women listen to NPR and feel safe and sound. Do that and you will get back bitching, cold shoulders, and isolation, at least in the professional/academic environment.
Of course, there are plenty of exceptions, especially once you get out of the bicostal zones, but, yes, professional/academic environments make poor hunting grounds if you are survival-minded.
Life is full of bitter and delicious ironies. How many people are aware that the unreliability of men was one of the factors that fueled the sixties and seventies women's movement? And that men were kept reliable by homophobia? I highly recommend Barbara Ehrenreich's "The Hearts of men" on this topic. It is some time since I read it, but it went more or less as follows. In the not too distant past the guys were kept in check by fear of being mistaken for gay if they did not marry and start a family. Being gay of course was not done. Along comes Hugh Hefner, who makes being a "Playboy" acceptable as a life style for straight men. Note it is play BOY, not play MAN. Also along comes the psychological industrial complex, with its emphasis on individual fulfillment at all costs at the expense of any collective, even the nuclear family. Suddenly there are what we used to call "displaced housewives". Women who had played by the rules, only to find the rules had changed in midstream. They had left their own careers in order to further the husband's, only to find the husband running off with a younger, more interesting woman, leaving wife #1 in the lurch. I am not saying this was the only factor and of course there were male equivalents, but it happened often enough that young women coming of age decided to not be sitting ducks. Of course, if society collapses everything changes again. But pardon us if we are not in a hurry to depend on protection.
As long as women can call 911, get a government/corporate job, or handouts from the government, men will never be more than a status symbol or entertainment. Not too many guys can supply either on a regular basis. Hence you’ve got the MGTOW movement.
OK. I just listened to the interview. I agree with much of what you say and what Piero is trying to do, and in my own life I have done most of it. We collapsed early and beat the rush. But I MUST object to your definition of a feminist. "A rich woman who exploits other women" WTF???? I am so tired of having to repeat this but here we go again. What you call feminism is a caricature resulting from a takeover by corporate capitalism.
I have always thought it was just humanism, "the radical notion that women are human beings.”
This quote is my favourite:
"I myself have never been able to find out precisely what feminism is: I only know that people call me a feminist whenever I express sentiments that differentiate me from a doormat.”
― Rebecca West
Quoting my own blogpost from some time ago. If I repeat myself on this forum, apologies.
"There was a lot more to the women's movement than getting the right to work outside the home. I vividly remember the earliest issues of Ms magazine, that devoted a lot of articles to the gritty realities of housework. In the beginning of the present wave in North America the movement wanted two things: Indeed, access to paid work and decent pay for the work outside that was already done, AND recognition of the unpaid work done by women in the home. The latter part was a big aspect of it.
What happened? How come the professional goals have been largely achieved, but at the cost of the importance of the domestic sphere?
I believe it was this: allowing more women in the workforce posed no threat to the status quo, the corporate agenda. On the contrary. It allowed real wages to fall while family buying power stayed more or less the same. I blogged on this earlier.
http://reflectionsrants.blogspot.ca/2012/03/generations-and-fortune.html
We might say that allowing women into the workplace is like allowing new players into a game. But the other side, recognition of the unpaid care work that supports all the rest, now there is a challenge! Dealing with the second aspects requires changing the game itself. No wonder it is taking longer.'"
There is quite a movement among younger, middle class families to return productivity to the household in these precarious times. I think it is great, though I get irritated when they call six chickens and a vegie patch a homestead. A certain degree of greater dimorphism in the division of labour might well occur as a result. I don't do chainsaws, though I know women who can, and I was the one butchering chickens.
We may well have to revert to a more traditional, more tribal way of living with fewer individual choices. We can see it starting to happen. Fine. All that self actualising is kind of exhausting.
Anyway, here's to men and men and women cooperating in the best way possible in the coming hard times. Thanks for all the good work.
Everybody seems to miss the two vital changes which modernity has wreaked upon men and women.
The birth Control Pill has changed women from Estrogen entities to confused Androgen entities. This hormonal change has to change many things in the female psyche. Women used to be superior to men but now they are fighting for equality.
The predominance of Estrogen mimicing plastics in everyday male lives must be feminizing them. They no longer even pretend to be superior.
The outcome of these two is pecisely what we see around us with gender roles being confused at both the physical and the psychological level by both males and females.
Gr
Ian, you bring up a very good point!
I really like the Plan-boy vs. Play-men analogy. yes, Barbara Ehrenreich's book is a must read!
it all illustrated that men and women are all alike played by the "system" (to make it short).
IMHO the greed (at personal level) & the sick individualism were the main levers Big Biz used to create the chaos. The steps were simple - push young people away from the families for better edu & job (divide). The separated failed in a grand way - falling cheap victims to Big Biz. They tried to fight back individually (feminism, playBoy, gay movements, etc.) and made the coffins of Big Biz even fuller.
So the main thing to blame - if we are looking for the most prominent one - for me is "I can manage alone". All the above listed "movements" are fake teams, artificial - there is nothing to keep them together when shit comes.
Fish is caught best in muddy waters.
@Graham:"The birth Control Pill has changed women from Estrogen entities to confused Androgen entities." Seriously? I remember being on it for ten years and not feeling any different, just enjoying not having to fuss with condoms. The pills were a lot stronger in that time too. On the other hand, I did know women who could not tolerate it. As always, nothing works the same for everyone. As for the xeno estrogens in the environment, I have wondered about that as well.
@Piero, Thank you. I will eventually buy your book.
@*n, entirely agreed.
Hello Ien,
This is not about individuals. Changing hormonal cycles in either of our genders changes many things. We see before us a cycle of maculinizing women and feminizing men, largely predominant in the Western societies. The Asians have not reached this point yet but probably will if they predominate onto the pill.
The pseudo-food and pharmaceutical industry go into great detail to explain how fractionally minute molecules and chemicals in our food and medicines can change our lives profoundly. The disruption of the female hormonal flows is magnitudes larger.
gr
We have created a world that is perfect for women. Nothing to harm them as we have killed everything that might possibly pose a threat to them. In fact, they have no fears other than from the men who made them safe.And the men now feel useless in a world created for women.
We have created the perfect world for useless people. We have zero skills little knowledge of anything of importance and have not learned a thing from our repeated failure of civilizations. It is like we are purposely being the thing that is going to kill us.If you actually bring up a topic that is even slightly uncomfortable or reality based. your on the outs. We will get what we deserve. and it will not be pleasant.
@Ien, Thank you.
@Piero, While both men and women are played by the system, it's a basic fact women are played vastly differently and because of their sex at that. It's not helpful to obfuscate the fact that women worldwide are treated like subhumans by institutions run by men. One pertinent example is that in the country side men in particular are the keepers of the status quo that is crumbling, and often with their egos can be a real problem for getting done any of the work women may rightly see as necessary, and that you seem to regard as helpful as well. Men recognize women trying to do something different, something local, something life-affirming, perceive that first of all as a challenge to their authority and to the sex-caste system, in effect putting any merits or even evaluation of such plans aside in favor or their own status, and unite as men against women on principle, and somehow manage to use women's sex against women and against change more broadly. The last thing in these otherwise non-pomo sane circumstances the women, or the communities need, is for men to gear up to "protect their women." First of all the men need to gear up to challenge every man to accept women's leadership and wisdom, and our role as protectors of the land, the communities, the sacred, the children as well as women, can come after that. Until then, our leadership from a false protective understanding will result in undercutting women's power and authority and in strengthening our ill-conceived extractive, technocracy-oriented authority in service to the system.
@Antti, you seem to have already read my book :)
@Ien in the Kootenays
Birth control pills affect brain structures in women, ultimately making them more similar to men. It does not seem to be a reversible effect.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/womens-brains-on-steroids/
Like most things that affect our brains, its not exactly something that people notice in themselves, its one reason why self-reporting is not very useful for research. Long-term pot use might cause memory loss, for example, but you won't see many people noticing; same goes for alcohol use or the like.
On sexual assault and rape in Northern Europe, I wonder if the situation is the same in Mediterranean regions. Women that have travelled to Italy talk about the constant harassment by Italian men in their travels, in the form of suggestive comments and especially pinching. The same women point out that Italian men are quick to defend a woman who is being physically taken advantage of (which I guess means anything beyond pinching). So I wonder how the ISIS provocateurs fair in these regions.
Birth control pills do not make women's brains "masculine". What a load of ignorance. The Pill simulates the hormonal state of pregnancy. A woman on hormonal BC has similar hormones to a pregnant woman. This is what prevents ovulation. There is nothing masculine about it, unless you want to tell me men's brains are permanently full of pregnancy hormones (they are not).
A cuppa coffee and snappy provocative repartee on a windy Saturday morn. I ask, what could be better? While the iron is still hot, I offer up this video of filmmaker myth-buster Aaron Russo might add a chunk of women's lib data as fuel for the fire : -) Portion of interview specific to women's movement Ms. Magazine etc here > https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zCpjmvaIgNA or in it's entirety here > https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LSGZ4Hkdyg4
All people are both male and female. The sooner we accept and embrace the fact the better.
May we find the tribe that is our home, one that embraces us in our shortcomings and glory.
@Evren wouldn't be nice if people would actually read the link before commentating
"Additionally, in Pletzer’s study, women using hormonal contraceptives showed larger gray matter volumes in the prefrontal cortex, pre- and postcentral gyri, the parahippocampal and fusiform gyri and temporal regions, when compared to naturally cycling women." aka, becoming more masculine.
Sheesh.
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